Not To Mention…

Paradise: Rain, 3 minutes

In the context of crane filled Liverpool which pits its cityscape alongside the flux of capitals like Beijing and Dubai, this film magnifies the role of one person, a surveyor who goes about his everyday job of reading his Dumpy level and communicating this in semaphore to his out of sight co-worker. In this three minute short, the simplicity of his action is co-ordinated to a pulsing rhythmic, incarcerating a caught fleeting second onto the medium of film.

Using found rotten fruit, four shorts; Apple Pile Grow, Accumulation, Midsommer Schism and Tray Play are compiled to form one whole. Each focuses on the nature-tech interface and hints at cultural identity in the context of urgent ecological breakdown.

In a visually playful dance of over 6 hours of video footage condensed into a five minute snapshot of Vieux Port, Yung amases the fruits of her far reaching video investigations – encounters with shop keepers, fishmongers, historians to Marcel Pagnol’s cast members across Marseille’s quartiers. Nodding to Moholy Nagy’s rendition of the city’s faces, Unite truncates viewer’s holistic experience of the story of a place and its people through fragmentation of conversation, architecture and visual experience.

SuperMLottery addresses cultural identity through covert video footage taken of daily aisle life in a local Chinese supermarket. With it’s red pavillion theme park architecture in a deprived area of the city, I was interested in how a particular assertion and occupation of identity is promoted. I was banned from filming inside the supermaket so I took to filming covertly. The continuous forty-minute shoot is visually quartered on screen and accordingly condensed in length. Viewers may get more value for time, but at the expense of linear narration.

The concealed microphone picks up indirect sub-current dubbing; an audio lottery of Cantonese pop songs from shop radio, the vibration of freezers, occasional cash register ring, and customer conversations … I stopped filming when I met my only Chinese friends in Dundee on leaving the store- they spotted the camera lens in the hole I’d fashioned in my bag. They were perplexed and I quickly made my excuses about noodles on the boil at home and left…

Through stop frame, Skye unravels a subtly transforming canvas that depicts eighteen hours in fifteen minutes. Skye’s staggered visual beat mimics the rapturous, plodding Buddhist chant to create a hypnotic that enables the viewer to lose his/her perception of real time. With such vivid hues and abstract fields of pastel colour, the viewer may be enticed to escape into a solitary Rothko gallery experience, a supposed edifying appreciation that crosses Tanguy, Tillmans and Monet. Skye is an interpretation of postmodern apocalyptic comedown rather than a Mondrian 1910 theosophical Evolution.